Epicus Doomus

With This Ring I Thee Dread

And now my disgust, rage and nausea gives way to resigned acceptance and a sad admission of defeat, as my worst fears are seemingly about to be realized. Cliff is going to ask Vera to marry him and he’s going to use that goddamned f*cking old decoder ring to do it. Not that long ago Cliff was hawking the thing on Ebay, today it’s an enduring symbol of the eternal love he feels for the woman he apparently forgot about for sixty years. Perhaps digging it out from under the bed in his sordid hovel of an apartment jogged his memory or something.

I have to admit it, while I dreaded the possibility of an unholy union between these two I never saw the f*cking decoder ring angle coming. The bastard out-hacked me yet again. Just when you thought it’d be impossible for this trash heap of a story to become any more sickening and repugnant bam, the f*cking SJ decoder ring hits you right in the face. I suppose I should have expected this but for some reason I always underestimate his ability to plumb the depths.

No

Link To Today’s Thinly-Disguised Attempt To Run Out The Clock

My God this is just repellent. The “frisky old coots” trope, some faux-ribald dialog straight from the “Three’s Company” outtake reel and that disturbing close-up, it’s a master class in classic FW hackery. Fifty year old Funky can barely tie his shoes anymore but the ninety year old Cliff and his ninety year old girlfriend Vera are flitting all over Hollywood like two kids in love, both of them sharp as tacks and full of vitality. I guess taking a six decade sabbatical from everything keeps you fresh for the homestretch. It’s all about as believable as anything else that happens in this unbelievably dumb comic strip.

Morty’s advanced Alzheimer’s disease turns him from a near vegetable to a chain smoking, trombone-playing horndog. Bull’s declining motor skills are played for laughs as he trips and spills human remains all over himself. Marianne’s wildly impulsive suicide attempt is smirked away as being no big deal. And now an agoraphobic elderly man is suddenly a full-time actor and man-about-town, sweeping his old flame off her feet. If cancer was even half as zany as mental illnesses are “Lisa’s Story” would have been optioned into a Will Ferrell flick years ago.

The Old Derby Got It Bad ‘Cause It’s Brown

Link To Today’s Thing

Ugh, it’s BatNard at his worst…wallowing in stupid old pop culture nostalgia via two annoying characters absolutely no one gives half a rat’s ass about. He obviously thinks this trite pandering nonsense is “cute”, but actually it’s just nauseatingly stupid…at best. The romance of the century, featuring two imbeciles who wasted six decades of their lives on…well, we have no idea. Now the two fossilized lovebirds are off to the hottest Hollywood eatery of the 1950s, the legendary Brown Derby, where perhaps they’ll catch a glimpse of Bing Crosby or Desi Arnaz while they’re gumming their tapioca and urging their waitress to please turn up the heat. Maybe tomorrow they’ll cruise the Sunset Strip in Cliff’s Edsel and catch the early-bird before heading out to see the Tommy Dorsey Band. Or barring that perhaps they’ll explain why their undying love for one another took a sixty year hiatus until two irritating busybodies brought them back together, but given how that would actually fill in the narrative gap (canyon), I seriously doubt it.

And sorry about that title but I can only work with what he gives me.

Crocodile Schlock

Link To Today’s Disappointment

Oh, gross. What the hell is this? A thousand and one unresolved plot threads are just dangling there, rotting away on the vine and he has time to focus on these two awful contrivances and their repellent old-timey smoochy talk? Man alive, it’s so nauseating I might keep a copy of it in the medicine cabinet in case I accidentally eat rat poison and need to induce vomiting quickly. Once again he goes to the “frisky old coots” trope and generates “ewwwws” instead of “awwwws”. Then “gaks” followed by a few rounds of “why the f*ck do I read this thing?”.

What is he even still doing there? Why is he always in that idiotic costume? WTF is Vera’s deal? And why are Mason and Marianne…I mean Boy Lisa and Pete hanging around the set again? Are we already due for another “gee Darin, I wonder how ninety year olds made out with one another back in the ol’ Batom Comics days?” arc again? I think it’s pretty remarkable how at first glance you can’t tell if you’re looking at Marianne, Summer or Pete, especially since one of them is supposedly a Hollywood sex symbol. Here comes the nausea again.

God I hope this is a grab-bag/garbage dump week because five more days of this is going to be hellish. The “new” characters don’t normally annoy me quite as much as the regulars do but Cliff and Vera are just gratingly bad and their already-abandoned little back story was blindingly stupid even by FW standards. Maybe it’s somehow leading back around to Frankie’s Film Food flim-flam but who the hell knows? Just please, not a f*cking wedding arc…anything but a f*cking wedding arc.

Bore And Snore-der

Link To Today’s Strip

“Yo, Petey! Listen, you know those thirty pallets of blank VHS tapes you boosted right before the format went extinct and couldn’t ever find a buyer for? Well listen, there’s this town in Ohio….”.

“Welcome to Slippery Pete’s Blank VHS Tape Emporium, formerly “Citizen Khans”, how can I help you? Two dozen blank VHS tapes? Why sure, that will be two hundred dollars, please (chortle).”

Taping…LOL. Taping “Law And Order” for twenty years…LOL again. “Too busy coaching”…uh yeah, sure he was, Linda, sure he was.